The 2020th edition of Maggio dei Monumenti 20, “Giordano Bruno 20/31: the vision beyond catastrophes”, organized by the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Municipality of Naples, kicked off today. An edition that began with the dutiful and heartfelt tribute to the philosopher Aldo Masullo, a Bruno supporter, an honorary citizen of the city, who recently passed away. The event will continue until May XNUMX, on the Department's social media channels, with many artistic contributions, hosted, without an audience, in the city's art venues.
AThe inaugural day of the event was dedicated to the philosopher Aldo Masullo, with video interventions by the Minister of University and Research Gaetano Manfredi, the Mayor of Naples Luigi de Magistris, the Councilor for Culture and Tourism Eleonora de Majo, Nuccio Ordine, professor of Italian literature at the University of Calabria who spoke live with a lecture entitled Philosophy as a way of life: Masullo; and the writer Guido Del Giudice.
GAETANO MANFREDI – THE MINISTER OF UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH
We remember Aldo Masullo, who passed away in recent days. A huge loss for Naples, for Campania, for Italy, for the world. Great intellectual, great philosopher, a man who gave so much to his communities, with great competence, with great communication skills and great wisdom. For me, it is particularly painful to remember Aldo, to whom I have ancient ties of friendship, of frequentation; with him we exchanged ideas, suggestions, proposals for the future. I think that when we remember a great character like Aldo Masullo, we must do so thinking about the future, thinking about his legacy, the message he left us, to be witnesses to it, to be capable of carrying this message forward in time. First of all, Aldo was a free man, a man who had the values of freedom and independence as a fundamental characteristic. It has always been so even when he has had political roles, both in Parliament and in other institutions. And he lived this freedom as a non-negotiable condition. When I last heard from him, shortly after Easter, he was suffering greatly from this lockdown. When I asked him about his health conditions, which basically prevented him from going out, he told me “it’s one thing to decide not to go out, it’s another thing to not be able to do so”. This is a very strong message on the theme of freedom, of the possibility to choose. I believe that the value of independence of thought that Aldo always brought with him represents a fundamental testimony for us. Another aspect I wanted to mention on this occasion is Aldo's ability to always speak positively. In a world made of divisions, contrasts, often useless clashes, Aldo was a man of comparison, of debate, even harsh, but always positive, to build. We are now coming out of this terrible pandemic, we need to rebuild the country, to rebuild the world, starting from values that are also ancient values but must be combined in a modern way: greater respect for nature, for others, for the common good; greater sense of community. We have to do it by discussing, comparing, thinking that we have to build something. Destructive controversy is useless, it does not help us grow, and above all it does not help the weakest. Finally, and I conclude with this last consideration of mine, I want to remember Aldo's great ability to talk to everyone. He was a great intellectual, a great researcher, a great philosopher. His thought was deep, long, but he had a capacity for communication that reached everyone. Open, not self-referential, capable of crossing generations and even worlds that are less culturally equipped. A great action. A fundamental action: looking at the diffusion of culture, the diffusion of skills, as an extraordinary instrument of democracy. Aldo Masullo was all this: a great intellectual, a free man, a man of construction, a man of the people.
LUIGI DE MAGISTRIS – MAYOR OF NAPLES
We did not want to give up the May of Monuments, because it is part of the history of Naples. It is certainly not the May with the crowded historic center and people in the museums. We decided to dedicate this May to Giordano Bruno for his free thinking. We decided to open this May with a tribute to Aldo Masullo, a great philosopher, with a profound humanity and a great ethical depth, a beacon not only of our city and not only in our city, but also beyond the borders of our city. I have always appreciated Aldo Masullo's critical thinking, his depth of analysis, his ability to look far ahead, to interpret popular Neapolitan culture. Popular means deep, in its roots, in the soul, in the body, in the heart. The day we awarded him honorary citizenship he made an extraordinary passage on Pulcinella and on Naples. A great connoisseur of the traditions of our city, with his thinking he enlightened and was a guide for many generations and, also, lastly, for many young people. Remembering, in these times, Giordano Bruno and Aldo Masullo, means never forgetting that only with culture, with free thought, with criticism, with humanity, with a profound ethical sense can one find the way and try to retrace the paths of the past and trace new paths.
ELEONORA DE MAJO – COUNCILLOR FOR CULTURE AND TOURISM
Last week Professor Aldo Masullo left us, a giant of contemporary thought, a pride of our city. Professor Masullo would certainly have deserved a collective farewell, a virtual hug from that Naples that he loved so much, for which he fought; that he defended so many times and, so many others, he reprimanded. Unfortunately we are not allowed, the anti-contagion measures prohibit any form of secular or religious celebration. For this reason, we decided to say goodbye to him, dedicating to him this morning of the inauguration of the Maggio dei Monumenti 2020, named after the philosopher Giordano Bruno, whom Aldo Masullo loved so much. Aldo Masullo was undeniably a Bruno follower, as he loved to define himself, meaning with this definition an ability to read the author's thoughts, without being fascinated by any form of orthodoxy, but rather moving skillfully among its contradictions and without any conditioning. On the other hand, Professor Masullo was a great enemy of absolute thought and sought within every philosopher, every scholar he studied, the essence of thought. This is one of his characteristics, which we always find in all his philosophical production, in all his lessons, in all his public moments: the search for essence. His relationship with Giordano Bruno is a relationship that looks exactly at this search. To tell the story of the philosopher first of all, not only as a philosopher of his time. Indeed, Aldo Masullo always emphasized, whenever he had the opportunity, the inadequacy of Bruno the intellectual, of this incredible figure, who had toured all of Europe, in some ways a modern figure, even from this point of view. He always emphasized the profound difficulty that Giordano Bruno had within his time, the 500th century. A time that Bruno described as a very ferocious time and, above all, as a time crossed by a ferocious intolerance, which would also lead him himself to be condemned to death. Aldo Masullo, every time he comes across the figure of Giordano Bruno, does an incredible operation, the same that we would like to be able to replicate in our own way during this May of Monuments: he manages to bring out the extraordinary topicality of his thought, without artifice, without any forcing. Aldo Masullo's Giordano Bruno is a sort of ductile material, which adapts to the present and helps us interpret it; a sort of ideal toolbox, with which we would like, in the coming weeks, to be able to open doors, discover infinite worlds and above all interpret the future.
NUCCIO ORDINE – FULL PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALABRIA
I accepted with great pleasure the invitation of the councilor de Majo to remember Aldo Masullo, a great scholar and a dear friend. I like that this memory is linked to another great philosopher like Giordano Bruno, who not only marked my personal life, but also marked the life of Aldo Masullo. In fact, his last book is a book in which he collects four essays dedicated to Bruno, with the title "Giordano Bruno. Maestro di anarchia", published in 2016. In the preface, Masullo recalls his love for Nola, the years of his youth spent in Nola and also recalls his love for Giordano Bruno, whom he defines as a traveling companion, who as a young man accompanied him throughout his life. The first thing that comes to mind is the common trait that I find between the great Bruno and the great Masullo: the idea of philosophy as a way of life. Philosophy is not considered by Bruno as a sterile exercise as an end in itself. For Bruno, the search for truth, philosophical study, understanding nature and the world must create metamorphoses within us, so that we are no longer the same as before. Bruno explains it clearly, also making a series of warnings to young people and readers, especially when he talks about how to run. Bruno says: 'in the race that we do towards knowledge, the important thing is not to arrive first, the important thing is to run with dignity. Often we arrive first even by cheating, by doping'. Bruno says this because when we face a problem, if our ideas do not translate into a way of behaving in reality, if they do not translate into a way of intervening, then our ideas are worth nothing. Thus Bruno puts his finger on one of the great evils of our time, in the political field, in the cultural field, in the most diverse fields: between the things we preach with words and our behavior in real life there is a terrible split. Well, Bruno says philosophy must be a way of living: I must live coherently with the things I think and the things, above all, in which I believe. This is a point in common with Aldo, for him the exercise of philosophy has always been an inconceivable exercise if not connected to civil passion. He has always translated his vision of the world into an intervention in reality, because philosophy must be a tool to change the world, to eliminate injustices, to make a series of interventions that give dignity to our thought and our work.
GUIDO DEL GIUDICE – WRITER – AUTHOR OF “I WILL TELL THE TRUTH”
It is not easy to express in a short message the gratitude for the moral and cultural legacy of Aldo Masullo. I have had the fortune of listening to his inspired conferences on Giordano Bruno on several occasions. But my memory is tied in particular to the presentation he wanted to dedicate to “Io dirò la verità”, a book of mine in which I imagined an interview with Giordano Bruno in the prisons of the Inquisition. During the presentation, Masullo recalled the distinction I had made between brunists (those who deal with Giordano Bruno, exclusively for study reasons), giordanists (the military supporters of the philosopher) and brunians (those who are neither fanatical giordanists nor professional brunians). Well, concluded Professor Masullo, 'I confess, publicly, to being a brunian'. Being a Bruno means sharing intimately the inspiring principles of a thinker who was truly a philosopher, because he did not limit himself to fantasizing, to contemplating the stars, but actively lived the civil and political events of his time. The thing that impressed me most about Aldo Masullo is that, unlike most academics who believe themselves to have a sort of right of pre-emption over lay scholars, he was open to discussion over everyone. Although I was aware of the enormous charisma he exercised over the audience, I never heard him utter a word that denoted intellectual pride. Tolerance, therefore, civil commitment, and, naturally, freedom of thought.
Article published on May 2, 2020 - 19:18 pm
